Thursday, 17 October 2013

My Favourite Horror Movies, Alphabetically: Martin

I love Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, but with Martin, the filmmaker left the undead to concentrate on a single sad, solitary psychosexual, and delivered what is, for me, his finest flick. Martin is a post-teenage blood fiend who is sent to live with relatives in industrial Pittsburgh. It’s there that the battle between folkloric horror and mental illness is fought, aided by outstanding effects from Tom Savini, who also acts in the film. This contemporary take on an ages-old monster (the vampire) works as smoothly as Romero’s updating of the zombie, and serves to (sympathetically?) advance the modern concept of the human monster among us as Hitchcock did with Psycho.

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About Me

A Writer/Project Manager at Graphcom Group (an advertising agency) by day, and a freelancer at night, I’ve written, mainly about movies, for The Buzz, Rue Morgue, and Cathay Pacific’s in-flight entertainment magazine Studio CX. I’m a grad of Humber College’s (Toronto) Film & TV Production program, and I’ve directed and co-written short films, one of which (Florid) won the Viewer’s Choice Award at the 2004 Reel Island Film Festival. I’ve been heard as a movie reviewer and pop culture commentator on CBC Radio, and I’ve edited and contributed scripts and ideas to television productions including My Messy Bedroom and Thrill on the Hill (CBC-TV’s Canada Day Celebration). My movie review cartoon strip And Yet I Blame Hollywood was adapted and animated as 26 two-minute television interstitials for CBC-TV’s late night program ZeD, and I wrote every single stinkin’ last episode.